One of the biggest snowfalls in several years impacted Indiana Wednesday. / Mike Fender, Indianapolis Star

by Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

by Bart Jansen, USA TODAY

For the Mid-Atlantic and New England, Friday is just the lull between winter storms.

The heart of a massive storm blamed for 16 deaths since Christmas Day is moving out of the Northeast and into Canada and over the Atlantic on Friday.

The storm was still dumping heavy snow on New England late Thursday, with wind gusts up to 30 mph, according to the National Weather Service. But heavy snow has turned to light snow across New York, after causing treacherous road conditions.

In Rochester, N.Y., which got 14 inches of snow, conditions led to a number of traffic accidents earlier in the day, for instance. However, police reported no fatalities because people were driving slower.

"We've had a number of accidents," New York State Trooper Mark O'Donnell said. "Their best caution as far as driving is to look out the window and see the snow and whether it's important enough to travel."

Scattered snow continued late in the day in the Poconos in eastern Pennsylvania and in New Jersey. A flood warning was also issued across central Jersey.

As the snow subsided as Thursday wore on, road crews and residents began digging out.

"The roads are actually in very good shape," said Wayne Gammell, maintenance administrator at the Agency of Transportation. "Pretty much our whole work force is out there," he said of 250 trucks.

More than 620 flights were canceled Thursday, bringing the total number of cancellations caused by the storm in the last week to 4,250, according to the flight-tracking service FlightAware.com.

Aside from cancellations, snow and ice across the region caused more trouble for the airlines on the ground than in the air.

On Long Island, a Southwest jet bound for Tampa veered off a taxiway and got stuck in the mud Thursday morning, but nobody was injured.

A flight that landed safely in Pittsburgh during the storm Wednesday night got stuck in snow for about two hours on the tarmac. The American Airlines flight arrived between 8 and 9 p.m., but then ran over a snow patch and got stuck. Passengers waited nearly two hours for the plane to be towed to the gate before they were bused to the terminal.

The storm, which began causing trouble in Texas on Christmas Day, has left death and destruction in its wake.

Deaths in the storm were blamed on toppled trees in Texas and Louisiana and vehicle crashes elsewhere.

The latest included two people killed in Kentucky crashes, a New York man killed in Pennsylvania when his pickup truck skidded on an icy road and an 18-year-old girl in Ohio who lost control of her car and smashed into a snowplow northeast of Cincinnati.

A man and woman in Evansville, Ind., were killed when their scooter went out of control Wednesday and they were hit by a pickup truck.

The storm wasn't large by historical proportions. But its odd mix of rain and sleet, high winds, tornadoes and blizzard conditions made for Christmas travel havoc.

"The way I've been describing it is as a low-end blizzard, but that's sort of like saying a small Tyrannosaurus rex," said John Kwiatkowski, a weather service meteorologist based in Indianapolis.

High winds were clocked at 64 mph at Dover Air Force Base in Delaware and in Boone, N.C.; 51 mph in Atlantic City, N.J.; and 60 mph in Eatons Neck, N.Y.

The National Weather Service said the storm will move into the Canada and the Atlantic by Friday morning.

In all, the storm wreaked its havoc across much of the eastern half of the country. On Christmas Day, tornadoes battered Alabama, Louisiana, Mississippi and Texas.

And its effects linger.

In Arkansas, some of the nearly 200,000 people who lost power could be without it for as long as a week because of snapped poles and wires after ice and 10 inches of snow coated power lines, said the state's largest utility, Entergy Arkansas.

Arkansas Gov. Mike Beebe, who declared a statewide emergency, sent out National Guard teams, and Humvees transported medical workers and patients.